Where is umbrage when you need it?

Over the years, and especially over the past couple of years, I’ve written quite a bit about the epidemic of umbrage that has swept through American politics and even infected the general culture. The news is constantly full of people taking offense, or pretending to take offense, at things other people have said. The term “gaffe” now describes not just occasions when a politician unintentionally tells the truth, as someone once said. It includes anything any politician says that can conceivably be interpreted as an insult to some group, especially some ethnic group, or as an aspersion on some individual’s race or religion or region of the country. Umbrage is the engine that moves election campaigns and the fodder that feeds the media’s politics maw.

We just went through a huge brouhaha over a comment by journalist Juan Williams, who said that he gets nervous when he sees men in Muslim garb boarding a plane, and another brouhaha when NPR CEO Vivian Schiller suggested that Williams needed to see his psychiatrist. Rep. Joe Wilson will go down in history for yelling “You lie” at President Barack Obama during the health care debate. And who can forget the stagey fuss, during the 2008 campaign, when MoveOn.org, a left-wing organization, ran ads making the lame joke of calling Gen. David Petraeus “General Betray Us”?

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Americans need a thicker skin. Or so I had thought until a few days ago, when the latest batch of President Richard Nixon’s Oval Office tapes was released by the Nixon library. On the tapes, Nixon is his usual self, vilifying or ridiculing blacks and Jews and Irish- and Italian-Americans. But the shocker is Henry Kissinger, then secretary of state, saying: “The emigration of Jews from the Soviet Union is not an objective of American foreign policy. And if they put Jews into gas chambers in the Soviet Union, it is not an American concern.”

Kissinger added: “Maybe a humanitarian concern.”

Just to lean over backward before piling on: The topic was Soviet Jews, and what the United States could or would do to help them was a legitimate and genuine quandary. As Nixon inimitably put it in concurring with Kissinger, “We’re not going to blow up the world” over this. But Kissinger — Jewish and a Holocaust survivor himself — didn’t just say, “This issue can’t be allowed to dominate our relations with the (now former) Soviet Union.” At a time when Soviet Jews were subject to official discrimination in jobs, long prison sentences on trumped-up charges, overt anti-Semitism in the state-controlled press and lots more of the same, Kissinger advised a president who had just finished revealing his contempt and dislike for Jews that none of this needed to be an American concern at all. Even gas chambers — another Holocaust — would be of no concern. Oh, maybe — maybe! — “a humanitarian concern.” And we all know what Kissinger — Dr. Realist — thinks about humanitarian concerns. One’s probably better off being no concern at all.